How much do you make?
You might not feel it’s enough. But if you’re the typical editorial reader, it’s more than $11,139 a year. And if you head a family of four, it’s probably more than $22,314.
Most of us don’t want to imagine living on those amounts, the federal definitions of poverty in the United States. The relative abundance most of us enjoy can blind us to the poverty in our nation, and in our own communities. But it is all around.
New Census figures reveal that 46 million Americans live in poverty, and 20 million live in deep poverty (defined as income of $11,157 for a family of four). That’s the highest number ever, and the poverty rate, at 15.1 percent, is the highest of any major industrialized nation.
Even those harsh numbers may be understating the problem. The federal poverty line is based on a basket of goods from 1955 (adjusted for inflation), and so doesn’t include any number of expenses that weren’t prevalent 55 years ago, such as child care. The N.C. Budget and Tax Center estimates that an N.C. family of four actually needs an annual income of $48,814 to make ends meet.
The new Census numbers portray a particularly grim picture in North Carolina and an even worse one in Mecklenburg County.
In just two years, from 2008 to 2010, North Carolina’s poor population grew by 326,000 people, an increase of 25 percent. The number of poor grew twice that fast in Mecklenburg. About 139,000 people lived in poverty in Mecklenburg in 2010, a 51 percent leap in just two years. The median household income has dropped 8.5 percent in Mecklenburg and 6.9 percent statewide in two years.
It’s a similar story across the South. After narrowing the poverty gap with the nation throughout the 1990s, the South is slipping back, hit hard by the housing crash and changes to the economy.
Children and minorities are hardest hit. One of every four children in North Carolina lives in poverty and an astounding 40 percent of black children do. The number of poor black children in Mecklenburg jumped more than 55 percent in two years. More than half of students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools qualify for free or reduced lunch. Mecklenburg’s poverty rate trailed the national rate by 2 percentage points in 2005. Now they are about the same.
This is a bad omen for the future. Children in poverty are more likely to grow up to be adults in poverty. Their education and their health are worse, on average, and so the cycle continues. New research suggests the recession has also led to an increase in child abuse.
Turning these numbers around will be no easy task. In the short term, lawmakers should focus on strategies that create jobs and allow and incent poor people to work, including providing subsidies for child care.
In the long term, our communities need to ensure they are providing an outstanding education – to all children. The low-skilled, middle-class jobs of yesteryear are gone. Today’s school children need to be preparing for a competitive, knowledge-based economy. Today’s educators, after all, are creating tomorrow’s high-skill workers, and the leaders who will help create jobs for them.